1.30

[Companion Cube]

"This came to me in a dream. I relaxed slightly as I leaned on the counter, coaxing some warmth into my thorax. Somebody had left the gas on the nearby cooker on, so I pressed to igniter to add a sense of completion to the scene. With a little blaze of black, I had a workable fire going. Ydgg joined me around 1.35.

""'lo", said he. I nodded in response. Without waiting for him to speak or even indicate to that effect, I began to tell him the story of my life. Previous generations of my famiy had survived as subsistance woodlouse- Oniscus Asellus, to be precise- farmers in the valley nearby, driving their chitinous flocks down from the hills come winter. I had a taste of this life myself at one point, when I was sent to live with my great-uncle. Herding the little bastards was a nightmare, and milking them a difficult proposition due to their propensity to curl up in a ball, and their lack of mammary glands. Nonetheless, the hardy folk of the valley persisted over the months, their numbers slowly decreasing due to a mysterious wasting disease. I confess I was not sorry to see the back of them.

"My trade, of course, is the covert taking of photographs when people are eating bananas. Once scanned into a digital format, genitalia can be added in with Paint Shop Pro.

""Ah, a traditional trade-" exclaimed Ydgg. "-so did your father adopt that profession when he left the valley?"

""Actually, my grandfather was the first to leave; my father, like myself, was born hereabouts." Initially we began as porn farmers, working effectively as serfs on one of the plantation domains north of the delta. The extensive banana groves nearby made such work fruitful and rewarding, and we often entreated other members of the family to leave their woodlice, but they remained tied to the land, those hardy folk.

"I remember my grandfather now; the rugged country type. He was a pioneer of the banana-photography trade, and we were able to eke out a fairly good living after paying our domain debts. From dawn to dusk, we would work out in the groves, concealed amongst the bushes and up in the crowns of each tree. On a good day, we could produce three, perhaps four dozen images total.

"My father was the more pensive type, but he took to his adopted trade well and soon got his family a hovel adjoining our grandparents'. This was about six years ago, you realise; the beginning of the Giant Isopod insurgency. They'd been driven eastwards out of the bathyplegic zone by government relocation programs, a full five hundred thousand of them, but they caused almost as much trouble when they settled north of the delta. Great brutes they were, a full foot and a half long. Without much say in the overall runnings of government, they nursed an unhealthy dislike of all other peoples, and a significant minority of them were the Crustaceonist militants that our government warned us about. They squatted at the edge of the forest, mainly growing vegetables. One night, afflicted by a curiousity towards them, I snuck out and observed a party of them depart their makeshift village and enter the jungle with several bulging sacks held loosely by their pereopods, dragging along the ground. I shadowed them for some time, blending in as best I could with the shadows. Presently, they reached a clearing.

"They'd not waited more than a double heartbeat when suddenly an even dozen armed Isopods emerged from the thicker jungle on the opposite side. These newcomers clutched the bolt-action rifles and machetes of the Crustaceonist guerilla, and inspected the sacks, which were found to contain food.

""So what'd you do then?" Enquired Ydgg. I rested my jaws for a moment, and then continued the tale.

"Naturally I was both terrified and thrilled by the appearance of the feared Isopod Liberation Militia- they were adorned with the red and green war markings of their foco, and their frightening exploits had been a staple of bedtime stories when I was but a tiny manca. Having made the exchange, they both departed the clearing, a few of the villagers leaving with the ILM. These were obviously new recruits, though I didn't realise at the time.

"Of course, I scuttled back to the hovel as quickly as I was able, and told no-one until almost a week later. In hindsight this bit of childish reticence quite possible cost a few lives, and I regret it. Nearby villages had already been visited by roving army units, who'd been rounding up the Great Isopods and removing them to protected villages encircled with barbed wire and punji stakes. It was not until they reached our village that I thought to warn them of the existance of the guerrillas not but a kilometre away. The stern-looking leftenant promised not to tell my father I'd told him, and crawled back to the ad hoc headquarters they'd set up in the village hall to radio more men from the nearest city.

"They left the sleeping village the following dawn, two hundreds strong, observed by none but my father and I, preparing a hide up in a nearby tree. He was as curious as I, but I dared not tell him of my part in the business. Just before midday there came a terrible racket up from one of the distant hills which peeked above the thick forest some metres distant. The continuous racket of rifles was interspersed with the ripping-cloth sound of a machine gun, and a minute of so later there came the crack of a Hate Bomb which coloured the entire sky in that direction a distinct green. They returned around dinner time, clad in their rubber gas armour and bearing four or five wheezing comrades on stretchers. Of the guerillas there was no sign, but for the red tinge on the soldiers' mounted bayonets.

""So that was your little contribution to the war?"

""That's what it amounted to, yes. I never told my father, and we continued to live in the village after most of the Isopods had been resettled again, this time in a guarded town by the river." I said, rattling a nearby cup with a maxilliped. Outside the window, a dog peeked in, and I turned to regard the gruesome single-faceted eye, large as my head. Something else in the village caught its attention, and it lumbered off.

It was about 1.50.

[Singular Quartet]

My brain sits upon my head, considering... and it thinks it's rather nifty.

[Norseman]

That was... that was... I have no idea what that was, but I kind of liked it!

[Companion Cube]

I should note that the above really was inspired by a particularly bizarre dream I had last night.